Forums

Minified VS. Packed Javascript?

I’ve done a few google searches regarding minified and packed javascript files…but I’ve yet to find a clear answer/explanation defining the key differences between the two. Aside from the file size and appearance of the markup, can someone please clarify the differences?

Minifying and packing for the most part refer to the exact same thing: reducing amount of syntax to provide the shortest code possible. I guess packing was the term early on before minifying catched up as a better term, and I guess (early) packers didn’t always do good job with code performance. Modern tools should be quite safe to use.

*Compression* is a different thing though. It refers to serving the JavaScript files as a GZIP compressed stream. This is transparent between server and client: web server can be set to do the compression on-the-fly while browser automatically uncompresses when it receives compressed data.

Thus you can get minimal transfer by first minifying a JavaScript file and then serving it compressed. And yes, the end result is often smaller than when only compressing with GZIP.